Colleges scramble to prepare for possible end of affirmative action | Hacker News Reader

Colleges scramble to prepare for possible end of affirmative action

bostonglobe.com

38 pointsgeox34 comments

Good, racist policies should go away

>For decades, affirmative action has served as an essential tool for colleges to increase diversity on campus. Now, with the Supreme Court seemingly poised to ban the practice, higher education leaders are scrambling to mitigate the fallout and come up with strategies to accomplish diversity goals.

It sounds like they're preparing for it by coming up with strategies to completely ignore the spirit of the ruling and continue with business as usual.

Great. It's their business; they can run it how they want. If elite northeastern universities want policies that tick rural southerners off, so be it. Y'all can run Ol' Miss any way you see fit.

Can they segregate against minorities too, then? They are free to do whatever they want, right?

The whole point is that publicly funded universities have to abide by federal rules. So it's not their business.

I was not clear because I was annoyed which is a poor way to post.

As long as the universities are following the law, they can run their organizations according to whatever “spirit” they want, especially if the spirit of the law is hateful.

Good.

I'm really left-wing (compared to the average American I'm far-left :p), and while I understand why college were the first to understand and act on affirmative action in the US (during the civil rights movement), those policies were 'good' at the time but it's not the case anymore.

let's be honest, they didn't 'trickle down' that much, or rather, they trickled 'up' in sports and entertainment, and that trickled down. Affirmative action by educated people did its job, but until you build equality from the ground up, you will never have it, and I think people on the left have to let go old policies that formed (or even formatted) them and don't work anymore.

Affirmative action in college is at worst reactionnary, and at best stationary (and, paraphrasing D'avray: being stationary is going back).

I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge what's the effect are, and how it work in the US, but it looks to me like liberal feminism, where the response to 'your economic system create systemic inequality and poverty to everyone, and my group in particular' is 'but look, if you conform to it, you can get almost as rich as we are'. Except it's education instead of wealth.

https://archive.ph/VYXYR

I hope this includes tenure. Few things are more threatening to kids in deep Uni debt than truly toxic professors who can't be fired.

There is a bill in the Louisiana Senate to end tenure at state schools. I am not sure quality faculty are going to hang around after that passes.

They'll move from state schools to private schools, because highly respected, well-performing teachers will be looking to work with other highly respected, well-performing teachers and well-regarded schools. This was already the case, but it will just result in further privatization.

Because Tulane has so many tenure-track offerings?

In materials, not physics (in my case). Tulane was also privatized in the 1880s and occupies a unique place in the state constitution with many functions as part of its formerly public nature (supervisory functions over state police, legislatively nominated scholarships, etc), but presumably still has enough influence to ensure this bill doesn't apply to it.

Kinda sucks but at least there will be some sort of competence-check. I paid $80000 for 50% of my profs to be overt progressive propagandists and I was too young and impressionable to really figure out what was going on. Credit to the Uni though, there was a physics prof who spent a lecture insisting climate change was not caused by humans whatsoever, so I guess there was a little balance.

And what grounds did this prof cite?

The other side of this is that it is brutally hard to obtain a post as a professor at a university (way more supply than demand), and professors having no protections at all might find themselves moving all over the country for whatever posts they can find when they get fired by some well-connected student who didn't like them saying the word "gay" or something.

What if universities just accepted everyone on a first come, first serve basis? No test scores, no GPAs, if you have a GED or high school diploma, you're accepted.

Edit: Wow, as soon as the West Coast got off work, the down votes came in. Still haven't seen why this is a bad idea.

What if community college?

Even better!!

So accept the people with means?

That's what they did already to entrench racism.

Some schools don't charge tuition. Community college tuition is usually very affordable to enable people to pay in full as they go.

Even Stanford was free until 1920 (15 years after Jane Stanford died under suspicious circumstances.)[1] Though Mrs. Stanford had also limited the number of women students to no more than 500, a restriction that was eventually overturned in 1933.[2]

[1] https://theconversation.com/from-public-good-to-personal-pur...

[2] https://stanfordmag.org/contents/why-jane-stanford-limited-w...

Assuming name brand schools could scale in an unlimited fashion and everyone could pay the tuition, we'd probably see major consolidation.

Well, I think about Harvards endowment, and that they could dramatically expand their acceptance rate and pay for everyone and still have many billions left over. There's still this exclusivity to higher education that I think is a big factor in keeping people out.

The product that Harvard sells precisely is exclusivity, not a quality education. You can get that anywhere.

If Harvard “dramatically expanded” their student body, they wouldn’t be Harvard any more.

Most college students attend non-selective schools, which do broadly accept everyone who meets a minimum standard.

Over half of Harvard's student body is on financial aid. Students from families making $85k or less pay 0% of their tuition. $85-150k are expected to pay 0-10% of their income. So if you're in a household that makes $150k/yr, your Harvard tuition is only $15k. From their website, "a lack of financial resources or need for financial aid are not impediments to your admission." If you can get into Harvard, you can afford it.

https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet

FIFO University

What if no?

This is called "open admissions" and community colleges generally operate this way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_admissions

If all universities did that, the few ones that actually make sense in their traditional form would collapse overnight. These are still important institutions.

I do understand that this wild-sounding idea would have a place under a different system for higher education and not just community colleges.

I know a quantum physicist, a pretty renowned one, who has an even wilder-sounding idea, which is to eliminate exams.

These ideas sound so wild, and perhaps practically are wild in the current context, because they don't express or account for the full mental model that the proponent likely has in mind.

Trying to engage with your point with a straight face:

I strongly oppose this because I personally experienced both public schools and a selective university, and I strongly doubt that it's possible to retain most of the good elements of my university experience without some amount of a selective admission process. The idea that a randomly selected set of the population can produce the same academic and social value that you get from a selected set of people who passed an admissions bar is hopelessly naive, in my experience.

Even the much-derided effect that prestigious schools serve merely to "label" people who pass the admissions bar has worked out well for me. As someone who has both the intelligence and conscientiousness to work to and through a good university, it's nice to have a document and label certifying that fact, and I legitimately think the world is in fact better for it.

Does university have problems? Sure. Are there people harmed by the existence of the US university system? Probably. But I can testify that my life has been very significantly improved by the existence of university admissions processes, and the honest answer to "what if universities accepted anyone who applied" is that I would personally have tried very hard to find something else (either here or in some other country) that fills the same role. This is a bad idea because it stunts the growth of a lot of people and destroys an institution that has a lot of value, and those things are bad for all the normal reasons.

Why do reputable, accredited universities not offer 100% remote bachelor degrees and accept all who have the potential to succeed?

it's not a bad idea. you're describing community college and some state schools. as long as you can pay, you're in.

to be clear, community college is incredibly important. these are one of the few pathways that economically disadvantaged people have to improve their station.

someone with no skills whose parents failed them can become a radiation specialist at a hospital making $70k/year if they put in the work. that's what America is all about.

unfortunately, part of the value of a college degree is the pedigree of the school. pedigree is obtained, in part, through exclusivity. super high pedigree schools have way more applicants than they do seats, so they can be picky.

think of the hoops that FAANGs put their applicants through. same idea.

> No test scores, no GPAs, if you have a GED or high school diploma, you're accepted.

Not everyone with a high school diploma is equipped to succeed at college. If there are limited spots, it's better to take those who can make the best use of them.

It's best in terms of the outcome for society as a whole, and it's best in terms of the outcome for the students. If you just barely graduated high school, it's better to not be admitted to college than to be admitted, fail, and be $20,000 in debt.

Sure, some people like that will succeed - say, 10% of them. Is it worth putting the other 90% of them in a worse position? Is it worth not admitting the people who would have a 70% chance of succeeding in order to admit those with a 10% chance?

I attended public schools K-12. They were a disaster. Why? Every child of a certain age who lived in a certain ZIP code was there.

I attended a private university. It was a more pleasant environment in which to learn because most of the people wanted to be there and most of them weren't stupid.

Then I want to law school. It was as much of an improvement over college as college was over high school. Almost every person wanted to be there and almost everyone was whip-smart, certainly way smarter than me.

Sadly, if there are more elite levels of education where everyone is even more dedicated to learning and even more intelligent, I probably won't be invited to them, because I would be such a tremendous distraction to those people with my tiny brain and low effort.

Your thought experiment just obliterated this system and I'm not sure why. How would your model improve some facet of the existing system?

This has been tried and works pretty well. My own parent was able to get into Uni and attended solely b/c they had to accept them if they had a High School diploma [1]. They easily might not have gone to Uni at all otherwise. And here's the thing- perhaps shocking to some- they actually blossomed in that environment, eventually displaying intelligence and aptitude that their High School teachers would never have believed.

So, perhaps binning children as teenagers and sorting them for life is actually wrought? Perhaps some of the people posting against this idea benefitted from admissions not b/c of their higher merit, but because it gave cover to the falsehood of such higher merit.

Universities have "competitive" admissions to cultivate mystique and exclusivity, because it gives them better pricing power and more donations.

[1] https://www.tonganoxiemirror.com/news/2016/jan/22/kansas-uni... [relevant quote: "Prior to 2001, Kansas universities guaranteed admission to anyone who graduated from an accredited Kansas high school, according to the Regents."]

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